do violence to

As professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner observe, construing the word “whoever” to mean “whoever except the president” would do violence to the English language.

This is an astounding—and astoundingly wrong—claim that would annul state constitutional voting and equality protections added to state charters over the course of two centuries, do violence to principles of federalism, and throw state electoral systems into disarray.

To quote a passage from this novel is to do violence to its tightly laced phrases of reconsideration.

But a panel of five judges on the Court of Final Appeal unanimously overturned both the conviction and sentence on Friday, saying such a wide interpretation "would do violence to the language".

Just like you said, at the beginning, these are a lot of people who do violence to other people and to each other.